TOPICS OF THE DAY.
LORD PALMERSTON.
AGREAT historic figure has disappeared from English political life with the death of Lord Palmerston ; and when we have said this we have by no means expressed a
merely imaginative or sentimental sense of loss, for in losing the recognition and distinct significance which attach to great names, England unquestionably loses also power. What it would be to a private person to find the meaning of his past life, however insignificant, suddenly obliterated from the minds of his acquaintances,—what it would be to us as a nation were the influence of our statesmen suddenly reduced to the same level as that of the American Johnsons, Sewards, Welleses, and Stantons, the stroke of whose pens can move indeed a physical power almost as great, if not greater than our own, but whose names carry with them as yet no associations much more persuasive than so many labels for the intelligent engineers of enormous trains of physical force, —that it is in part, though only, of course, in part, when the man who embodied to other nations, far more than any half-dozen of our statesmen, our recent political history and national aims, vanishes from the scene. England is not weakened except by losing the judgment and experience of one man, but the impression which the name of England makes on the minds of other Courts, Cabinets, and peoples suddenly shrinks in fulness of meaning, becomes a blanker assemblage of political possibilities, stirring fewer memories and exciting less distinct expectations than before. Think only what Lord Palmerston represented in relation to English foreign policy. To Belgium he stood in the attitude of political parent, and it is said, with what truth we do not know, that the name of Belgium was on his lips during the occasional wandering of his last few hours of exhaustion ; to Greece
he stood somewhat in the position of " those fathers of
our flesh " who take the right of chastening what they have in some measure called into existence. To Por- tugal he represented the services of a generous guardian and of a steady enemy to one of her most detestable usurpers; to Spain, the friend of Spanish freedom and Spanish in- dependence against the overwhelming influence of France ; to Italy he represented the warmest sympathies with her national aspirations, and a share by no means insignificant in the eleva- tion of the Piedmontese monarchy and arms to a position in Europe from which it became possible to strike a blow for unity ; to Austria he represented a curious mixture of tradi- tions, some of them conciliatory, many of them menacing, all of them didactic ; to Turkey he was as " the shadow of a great rock," saving her from imminent destruction ; to Russia he was a once defeated, often thwarted, but on the whole a formidable and triumphant foe ; to Prussia a stumbling-block and an offence; to France an ally who had once and again gained her influence in Europe, who knew her strength and greatly valued her aid, but who never hesitated to countermine her intrigues and revenge her breaches of faith when he found her betraying the popular cause on behalf of which be had sought her alliance. In all these countries the name of England recalled immediately the actions and the wishes of Palmerston, and when there was talk of the purposes of England the chief element in their calculations was the pro- bable state of mind of him whom we have lost. There are no doubt others remaining, one at least whose name is often on their lips, and with some of whose views they are familiar; but in losing Lord Palmerston we have lost a real part of our acknowledged significance in the councils of Europe, and shall exercise, at first, less influence over the imagination even of statesmen in foreign Courts than we have wielded for the last half-century. And for the most part, we believe, though not perhaps completely, the foreign influence we have thus lost was a useful and wholesome influence, which gave us much power for good and little for evil.
It is true, however, of Lord Palmerston, as of most of the historic figures of the political era to which he belonged, that the very education and the very qualities which fitted him to exercise a wide influence abroad, diminished the depth of his influence over home affairs. The politicians to whom nations are habitually the units of calculation rarely base their view of the reciprocal duties of different elements of the same nation on the highest grounds. They are so accustomed to those larger and vaguer principles of expediency, like ' balance of power' for instance, on which alone, in the absence of positive con- tracts, you can build international policy, that they are always in danger of overlooking the minuter and closer relations of interdependence between the various constituents of the same national society and State, which give rise to the higher sentiments of political justice and equity. Lord Palmerston's. political character was moulded in what we may call the in- ternational period, before the end of the great war, when. politics meant almost the same as policy. The feeling for the deeper obligations between various classes, founded less o mere interest than on the knowledge of the mutual injuries each is capable of inflicting, and the mutual help each is capable of giving to the other, came later, when the more superficial but more noisy quarrels of the nations had been partly settled. Lord Palmerston always applied the easier principle of external expediency to these deeper and narrower questions. " Although I wish the Catholic claims to be con- sidered," he said as early as 1813, "I never will admit these- claims to stand upon the ground of right. To maintain that the Legislature of a country has not the right to impose such political disabilities on any class of the community as it may deem necessary for the welfare and safety of the whole, would be to strike at once at the fundamental principles on which civilized government is founded. If I thought the Catholics were asking for their rights, I for one would not go into com- mittee." So, too, when the question of Reform came on, he was always for giving a little, early, in order to prevent the. demand for much, later on. " I supported all the proposals for limited reform," he said, "because I clearly foresaw that. if they were refused we should be obliged to have recourse to wider and more extensive changes," and the same line of policy- -policy in the Foreign-Office sense—was always taken by Lord. Palmerston in discussing the questions of the deepest interest touching constitutional reform. Hence the grasp he had of' home affairs, and the influence he exercised in relation to them, was much slighter than that of some of his younger col- leagues. To the end,—indeed never more than during the- Ministry closed by his death,—Lord Palmerston carried him- self towards domestic questions in the same diplomatic attitude,—rather weighing the strength of the demand for change, and the price of satisfying that demand, than entering into its intrinsic justice. Hence he never yet was the repre- sentative of any intense or even eager party, on domestic- questions. A mild reformer so long as the malaise of society due to electoral abuses was vividly distinguishable, he was a cypher in the great Reform agitation; a mild free trader,. with very clear perceptions of the general argument on which free trade rested, he never took high ground enough to be otherwise than a cypher ip the great free-trade agitation. He- was a statesman of the telescopic school rather than the micro- scopic; who grasped the sweeping outlines, but never went deeply enough into the organic relations of vital domestic ques- tions to satisfy the strong feelings and intense perceptions of those who discussed them on the basis of right and wrong. The study of wide international questions is scarcely a good pre- paratory school for the narrower, deeper, more concrete politics of a nation in rapid growth. Lord Palmerston first gained the ascendant when the nation became an undivided. unit in time of war and all interior questions had been laid to rest. And during peace he kept it, chiefly because the peace was an armed peace, in which external and international relations were of far more importance than the interior rela- tions of class with class.
And the same training which determined his province as a statesman, determined also his peculiar power. He was above all things a masculine, lucid man of the world, appealing to men's interests and honour rather than either their passions, conscience, or their sentiments. There was a good hard grain in everything he said and every thing he did. What a public school boy is to a homebred boy, that was Lord Palmerston to most. other English politicians. Nothing was more character- istic than the way he pushed aside considerations which he thought womanish. When Mr. Disraeli in 1859 com- plained of the language used towards the Tory Government as ungenerous or unfair,—Lord Palmerston asked if they were a pack of children, to come whining because they bad received the usual blows of party fight instead of giving back as good as they got. When he was charged in 1848 with neglecting the old alliances of England, he replied sharply, "As to the romantic notion that nations or governments are much or per- manently influenced by friendships, and God knows what, why I say that those who maintain those romantic notions, and apply the intercourse of individuals to the intercourse of nations, are indulging in a vain dream. The only thing which makes one government follow the advice and yield to the counsel of another is the hope of benefit to accrue from adopting it, or the fear of the consequences of opposing it." And he acted on the principle. He was sometimes given credit for. an extravagantly French policy because it was his first policy, and his last, and because he thought it our interest to be the first to recognize Louis Napoleon after the coup d'itat. But no English statesman ever gave France harder blows, or shook her off more easily when he saw that she showed no respect for this country's interests. No pet methods of interna- tional action were ever allowed to override the clear, bold
counsels of policy. Lord Palmerston was not a man to let his favourite instruments mould his ends. No doubt be stuck by the acts of his subordinates on principle,— for he knew that he could never get masculine and indepen- dent agents if he disowned all their errors and availed him- self only of their hits. The same necessity which makes fidelity to personal engagements the first point in the world's -code of honour, made it one of the first in Lord Palmerston's code of policy. But though he would defend an agent who _ had blundered in the due exercise of his responsibility, he never allowed a mere mode of action to influence him after it had ceased to be efficient. He threw over a useless alliance with as much alacrity as if the language of friendship, which between nations only covered decently, he thought, the promptings of national self-interest, had never been used.
The same habit of mind, however, which made him thus bold, decisive, and vigorous in dealing with the clear interests of men, gave a certain baldness and in- efficiency to his style in dealing with those half-moral, half sentimental sides of life, which press themselves upon the public speaker. Nothing could afford a greater contrast than speeches of Lord Palmerston and Mr. Gladstone, on any sub- ject whatever, say, Italy, or commerce, or peace. Lord Palmer- ston's speech was, so to say, all skeleton,—the dry bones of clear self-interest just peeping through a little ineffective flesh of oratorical terms. Mr. Gladstone's is all living nerve and tissue, with perhaps even too little indication of the hard bone beneath. This it was that made Lord Palmerston's not unfrequent theological dissertations and eloquent moral sentiment so grotesque; when, for instance, the Catholic dis- abilities were repealed, be said that the labours of that session would form "a monument—not of the crime or ambition of man—not of the misfortunes or convulsions of society—but of the calm and deliberate operation of Benevolent Wisdom w atch- ing the good of the human race." Lord Palmerston's feeling was always bald. There was no natural growth of sentiment about public questions in his mind, and when the conventions of society required something of that sort to be said, he said it with a schoolboy's vague general impressions of the " sort of thing " that was wanted. But his humour was not bald, for it was a compound of perfect ease and presence of mind with real enjoyment of the give and take of society. A Prime Minister who, though not without aristocratic hauteur, could put off, dr rather who never put on, the grandeur of State, who not only had no shade of the late Sir Robert Peel's middle-class pompousness, but felt all the lively personal situations in the House of Commons as if they were opportunities for good- .humoured enjoyment in his own private circle, could not but have a rare fascination of his own. No great Minister except himself would have thought of putting down a tiresome cate- chist like Mr. Darby Griffith when he inquired if a junior Lordship of the Treasury were really vacant, and if it was Her Majesty's intention to fill it up, by replying gravely that it was no doubt vacant, that it was certainly Her Majesty's inten- tion to fill it up, and then in mimic telegraph suddenly offer- ing to place it at his disposal if he could be bought at that price. No public man of equally hard grain had ever so much _zeal vivacity. He was stronger than the men who survive him. To him the world had been really a public school, and it had made him what he was by its discipline. Cooler and more sagacious than Lord Derby, far more solid and more sane than Mr. Disraeli, less petty and more generous than Lord Russell, sounder and keener than Mr. Gladstone, England will surely have occasion to regret his hardy mind and high spirit. A gene- ration of more limited, more sensitive, and perhaps richer- minded statesmen will possibly succeed him, but a bolder historic figure will scarcely find its place among English statesmen of the second order, than that of the great Minister we have lost.
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